For his first Lunar Flower release, Dimitri Barnias has crafted perhaps the most quietly unsettling album ever recorded. With Band Reject, he has not created music in the traditional sense - instead, he has fashioned a set of subtle, complex sound environments. Dimitri teaches and works as an electronic musician in Crete, and both his knowledge and skill within the genre are evident in Band Reject.
The album recalls a long tradition of experimentation in electronic music, and it is the latest in a line of sound-collages that hearkens back to 1940's Paris and the gestation of Musique Concrete. Band Recject is much denser than those early electronic music pieces, however, as Barnias has acquainted himself with the technologies and the methods used by electronic musicians of both yesterday and today. His quiet tones are masked in effects, and one cannot distinguish whether most of his sounds are synthetic, or if they are all acoustical real-world sounds manipulated by effects.
In each of the pieces on Band Reject, there exists an undulating, sustained, tone which provides the unique backdrop of the sound environment. Gradually, these tones begin to change and to coexist with various other types of sounds - blips, thuds, scrapes, rustling - some which may be computer-generated, and others which are just barely recognizable as footsteps or human voices.
Throughout the album, Barnias employs hard panning effects, digital synthesis, and a host of other electronic techniques to evoke an uneasy ambience which pervades the listener's auditory space. In "Delta Function," dissonant, high pitched tones produce an eerie sense of the unreal, while in "Band Limited," Barnias uses stark silence to dramatically warp the listener back from their perspective of unreality.
This is the subtle magic of Dimitri Barnias's music - although it is a profound experiment in allowing music to inhabit and overtake a particular place, once Band Reject has been fully experienced, the listener will have found himself by way of an utter displacement of consciousness.
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Reviewer:sonicson - - July 20, 2008 Subject: quietly unpredictable This work is amazing. For me, is definetely the more experimental work in the Lunar Flower's arsenal. The sonic diversity of this project makes it for some 'classical' audience hard to understand it, but an experienced listener of this type of music, soon realizes it's superb, interesting piece of work. I would expect more stuff like this from the very good anyhow, Lunar Flower label.
Reviewer:junbuggy - - June 19, 2008 Subject: huh? after listening to derrick hart, ian d hawgood and justin robert on lunar flower i decided to try this. fresh into thinking lunar flower might be the most unknown but brilliant label around i have to say i am sorely disappointed. i loved the previous artists melodies and fun experimentation - this is nice in parts but as a composer i find this...boring to say the very least. it doesn;t do anything significant and the only good thing i can really say is that its well produced (ie. clean). a huge disappointment for lunar flower.
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